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Chapter 4: Discover Your Own God

A man was looking for a wife. He asked an agent. The agent said, “I have a beautiful woman just for you, a very rich widow. Of course, she is a little older than you, but with so much money that I don’t think you would like to miss the opportunity. And she is beautiful! Come along with me. I will show you the woman.”

The man went to see the woman. Looking at her he could not believe his eyes - he had never seen such an ugly woman. One eye was looking in one direction, the other eye was looking in another direction. Her nose was crooked, her teeth were coming out, her hair was false, one leg was longer than the other. It was just disgusting to see her!

He whispered in the agent’s ear, “You call this woman beautiful?”

The agent said, “There is no need to whisper - she is deaf also! You can say out loud whatsoever you want to say. And I can’t help it if you don’t like Picasso. That’s not my fault!”

Modern art is ugly for the simple reason that it has no spirituality in it. Modern poetry is ugly. Modern music is just noise - very sexual, because when spirituality is not present, all that is left is sexuality. Spirituality is the same energy as sex but at the highest peak, at the most refined peak. Sex is also the same energy but very rough, at the lowest point. Sex is animal energy; the same energy passing through the art of spirituality becomes spirituality, becomes samadhi, becomes super-consciousness; it becomes divine energy.

Hence Bertolt Brecht is angry. That anger can be understood. But anger cannot be creative; even if it creates, that creativity will carry something destructive in it.

You will be surprised to know that Adolf Hitler when he was young, wanted to become a painter. He was refused admission to an art academy. Then he wanted to become an architect, but again he was refused. And the same man became the most destructive man this century has known - not only that the century has known but the whole of history. If he had been admitted to the art academy he would have become another Picasso; his paintings would have been destructive.

He painted a few things - those paintings still survive. They say much about him. He uses the blood-red color out of all proportion. His most loved colors are blood red and black; with these two colors he worked, he painted. He has left a few drawings, his architectural ideas; they don’t look like the Taj Mahal, they look like madhouses! But the man became powerful, he became a politician, and he really did his painting and his architecture and his artwork with living humanity, on the vast canvas of humanity. But those two colors remained his colors: dark black, the color of death, and blood red, the color of murder, anger and rage.

Bertolt Brecht would have been a buddha, just as Friedrich Nietzsche would have been a buddha. But they became too obsessed with so-called religion. And going against so-called religion, they went against religion as such. That’s where they missed, they went wrong.